The next version of the Google Pixil phone is the Pixil 10. The Pixil 10 phone is the first phone to come with a built-in AI. The phone is so advanced that among several new features, it comes a real-time universal translator. You can make or reveive calls to and from anyone anywhere, regardless of language differences. As you and the other person speak to eachother, each of you hears the other person in your and their own respective languages, in real time. In addition, the other person hears you in your own voice, in their language. You hear them in your own language, but as their real voice.
The GrapheneOS team appears to be unsure if they can or should support a version of their operating system that runs on this Pixil 10 phone.
The Pixel 10 hasn’t been released yet. It should be released in a week.
I don’t believe the “first phone to come with a built-in AI” unless “built-in” is different than what I think. I believe that the “live translation” feature is just some LLM software running on the new Gen5 Tensor chip. i.e. I think it’s optional software that is part of the default Pixel install. Just like Gemini and Gemini Nano are part of the default Pixel installs running the the current Pixel phones (Pixel 8 and Pixel 9) using their Tensor chips (specialized chips for LLM processing). The current GrapheneOS phones don’t use Gemini unless you specifically decide to install the google assistant (most people don’t AFAICT).
The kind of translation capability that this Pixil 10 is promoted as having, seems quite different than anything we’ve seen before. Up until this device, voice language translation has been somewhat like talking to a robot on a CB radio, but with a time delay added also. So you would talk until you’re done talking and then you wait longer after you stop talking because after you stop talking, then the translated voice message is translated and spoken to the other person. So you take turns talking and waiting as the device would listen and then translate the message as a human translator would do, by not interrupting the person talking, but by waiting for the talking to stop before the translated message begins. By controlleing the audio on both ends of the call, by each caller having no other method to hear the other caller directly, and with real-time translation on both ends of the call going in both directions at the same time, it should be possible to hear the message in real time at the same time, in both directions, despite the language differences. I don’t know if any translation device like that has ever been on the market before. But in addition, the article that I read said that the AI learns your voice and uses your voice in the other language and with the appropriate emotional nuances included. If that is correct, it would sound exactly like the person who is speaking has mastered speaking in the other language.
Worth drawing your attention to one of the replies:
There in no dilemma.
Wait until Pixel 10 is released and then wait until GrapheneOS is supported.
The fundamental question for any such translation functionality is … does it happen 100% on-device? Or does it necessarily involve sending information to the Google cloud? Is it dependent on the internet in any way? Does it unnecessarily send information to Google? (for “quality assurance purposes” … yeah, right)
Until you know the answer to that, you should not touch this functionality.
That said, the topic that you link to does not even mention this functionality, so a citation would help.
When it comes to whether or not to touch the functionality, one has to consider how the GrapheneOS team is tasked to do what they do. Although the hardware is made by Google, GraphineOS is supported by the opensource community and not Google. The phone’s operating system is purpose built to protect your security. And although we probably shouldn’t trust anyone, you have to trust someone. I think it’s probably safe to put the GrapheneOS software team in the same category as we put Purism, at least when it comes to their intent.
However I would be surprised if the GrapheneOS people do as good of a job as Purism does to actually create airtight security. Any firmware blobs in a Pixil phone are going to remain, even after the Android operating system that Google put on the phone has been completely erased and GrapheneOS installed. GrapheneOS actually has some pretty good Security countermeasures in place. It comes super secure by default and without anything from google installed. Then it comes with a whole ecosystem that protects you if you should choose to install the google software. Somehow, you usually do not have to decide between getting basic functions or not, as the price for getting access to most Android apps. You can install the Google framework and Google apps in to an ecosystem where neither Google nor the app has root access. The Google apps are taught how to behave appropriately and they lack the ability to communicate with the outside world or with other apps.
Of course. Which means that in principle you can get an answer to the question (in the future when it actually exists).
However my comment was also addressing the possibility that someone just runs Android on their Pixel 10. Would we want to extend Google’s uber-surveillance model - as already applies to email, search, TV, docs, journeys, … - to voice phone calls?
Well, yes. It is basically impossible to guarantee that there is nothing lower level still in place in order to compromise your privacy. The entirety of the hardware (e.g. SoC and any ancillary processors) is Google-designed.
However my question was pitched at a less pernicious level - since traditionally it has been the case that low-powered devices didn’t have enough horsepower to handle speech on-device and speech therefore conveniently had to be sent to the cloud for processing (where it could be recorded / scanned for marketing opportunities / scanned for unauthorised thought processes / mirrored to your government / hacked / surrendered under court order / …).
I guess this could raise an interesting question for law enforcement. They record a phone conversation between two persons of interest who are speaking different languages from each other. Real-time translation means that what the government records is not what the speaker actually said (assuming on-device processing). Nuance may be lost, meaning may change in subtle ways, or outright translation errors may be introduced.
In addition, identifying in court the parties to the phone call by voice could become trickier - since the voice too has to be synthesised / altered in some way - and hence also can be faked. What exactly do I sound like speaking Mandarin when I don’t speak Mandarin at all? (I have deliberately chosen Mandarin here, as a tonal language, to make it more difficult.)